Rape Survivor Tells Congress Gun Control Left Her Helpless

I’ve heard people sometimes call gun control regulations “victim-disarmament laws” and for very good reason. As we’ve said many times, bad guys don’t follow gun laws. If they did, they’d probably follow all the other laws as well and not be bad guys. It’s just a simple fact.

But gun laws do impact the good guys.

Right now, the House of Representatives is hearing testimony surrounding guns as they plan to ram through new gun control regulations regardless of what they hear in the testimony.

Savannah Lindquist was one of the witnesses asked to testify and she was in the minority of speakers in asserting that gun control could leave crime victims helpless — just as she was when she was raped on a gun-free-zone campus in Virginia.

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Linquist, 24, shared that she believes gun control laws may not only benefit criminals but fail to stop mass shootings or save lives.

“I was living my dream,” Lindquist, 24, said. “I had just begun my senior year of college. I was at my dream school with my dream major. I loved my job and was just months easy from graduating college.”

“I was so excited, especially as a first-generation college student,” Lindquist said.

But that dream quickly changed to a nightmare, Lindquist said, as she was raped and left “shattered.” She dropped out of school and returned to her parents home.

Still, Lindquist said in her moving testimony that she was not testifying for pity but for common sense legislation.

“I am a gun owner and I was one at the time,” Lindquist said, adding that shooting is a family tradition and that she has handled firearms since she was 10 years old.

“Yes, I could have broken the law and brought my firearm to college,” Lindquist said. “I obeyed the law as a responsible gun owner and it ends up in me being raped.”

Unfortunately, that happens. It may well have happened because it was a gun free zone. Criminals don’t like armed victims, so they’re far more likely to seek out places where their potential victim is disarmed.

You know, places like college campuses.

Anyway, Lindquist isn’t the first to lament her decision to follow the law only to be victimized by someone who doesn’t. Perhaps the most famous example is Suzanna Hupp, whose parents were gunned down in the Luby’s Cafeteria shooting back in 1991. She stated that she had a firearm in her vehicle, but left it there to comply with state law. Instead, she watched her parents get murdered right before her eyes.

No one can show how things like gun free zones have stopped criminals. It hasn’t happened once, but we know of instances when people who survived being victims say they were disarmed solely because they opted to comply with the law.

While I’m sure Lindquist isn’t the kind of person the Democrats wanted to hear from, her story is just as important, if not more so, than the anti-gun proponents speaking during the hearings.

Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. He's also the host of Unloaded TV on YouTube.
https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/